What the critics said (about other writers):

They're pussy novels, you're right. Just this terrible, relentless quest for pussy. [Also,] full of failure, which is like life, which is what I like about [his] work.

Gore Vidal

... [his] effort to show the adventures and the history of [his characters] ... as determined by their feelings and the nature of their minds ... [and contempt] for any conceit of "plot," nefarious name.

Harry James

... all his creations ...[were] human beings, not ... damned souls knocking themselves to pieces in the stuffy darkness of mystical contradictions.

[Il a] vécu tout cela!

Joe Conrad

[He] never starved in a garret ...nor did [he] struggle in sweat and blood to bring forth mighty works, nor did [he] ever wake up and find [himself] famous.

David Lawrence

If [they aren't] fit to read then life isn't fit to live.

Jimmy Joyce

[They] express the facts of life rather than the poetry ... [they have] the willingness to go anywhere, to lick up with [their] long glutinous tongue the most minute fragments of fact [and insinuate themselves] into crannies and crevices which poetry [could] never reach.

Ginny Woolf